We all have them. Bodies aren’t some unique trait to the Son of God. For some unknown reason God decided that becoming a human was a good idea. God decided to concentrate love, mercy, forgiveness, and absolute salvation in a fleshy, soft, fragile body.

We call this reality incarnation. And if and when we talk about this concept, it’s usually at Christmas time, when God, in Jesus, is a baby. We like to think of Jesus as a baby. They are lovable, sweet, and fairly close to perfection, holding a vast potential of possibility and dreams.

But just as we do, Jesus grew up – going through toddlerhood and puberty before inhabiting an adult body. For many of us as we grow into adults our view of ourselves and our body diminishes. I don’t know if this was true for Jesus, but seems universally true that inhabiting a body isn’t easy.

Often we don’t know what to do with them.

We desperately try change them, improve them, shrink them, hide them. We compare ours to others. We analyze them, take them apart, and we like some parts more than others.

True?
And being much more powerful than babies we are able to exert control over them: tighten them, shape them, mold them. Make them be what we want them to be. Or at least we try to.

I’ve been able to make my body do what I want it to do for most of my life.

I’ve trained to run faster. I’ve watched what I eat. I’ve cared for my skin with sunscreen and lotions. I’ve even made my body do things I shouldn’t have made it do: like weighed too little or pushed my body too far in training, but by all accounts I could do that because I am in control of my body.

I’ve been able to self-select what I like about my body and what I want to change, until fairly recently.

I thought a lot about whether I’d say this next part, because I don’t want the message of the entire sermon to boil down to this… and that sometimes happens when you share a story, but this experience is a reality of bodies.

This is still a bit of a raw wound for me and fairly sensitive but, I need everyone to hear that I am okay. This is not a worry for you.

8 weeks or so ago I had a miscarriage.

It rocked my world. On so many levels.

I’d had three healthy children with no problems. I hadn’t even gotten my head around being married when I found out I was pregnant. And we won’t even go into the anger and confusion I felt at and with God when as quickly as I was pregnant, I wasn’t…

This. This I could not control. My body had failed me. Maybe for the first time ever.

Bodies fail. We spend much of our lives trying to pretend they don’t, but they do.

This matters because if we take the incarnation seriously it means Jesus’ body was just as frail, broken, and unpredictable as ours, which is fairly striking if you stop and think about it. The savior of the cosmos didn’t overcome the body, but was the body.

The whole body.

We tend to focus on The body as a baby, The body as a healer, The body as risen, The body as a savior….

But, Lent is The body anointed, The body beaten, The body killed, The body entombed.

What saves the world in many ways is Jesus’ humanity – his willingness to be fragile, vulnerable, and to have his heart broken.

His willingness to have his body fail on the cross. Saviors don’t die. At least not until Jesus.

So, Jesus’ radical statement that the body, his body is the temple of God matters. A lot.

What the people heard and saw on that day as he shouted through the temple, over-turning tables, and sending animals screeching was:
Violation, blaspheme, disregard, and wreckage.
They saw a desecrated temple.

But, by saying his body is the meeting place of God, Jesus does the exact opposite of desecration. He purifies the temple by utterly humanizing it. Everything about the body now belongs in the temple.

His body becomes a temple where miscarriages and eating disorders belong. A place where cancer and puberty belong. A place where broken hips and failing eye sight belong. A place where irritable bowels and PMS belong.

And not only do they belong, but Jesus on the cross claims that even a temple which is crushed is still a living testament to God.

Jesus couldn’t be partially human, selectively human, just as we can’t. If you are human, well then, it means the whole thing.

This matters a lot to me right now. It means that while I feel my body failed me, while it may have been crushed, it’s not separate from that which is godly and good and right.

It belongs.

Jesus’ incarnation didn’t come to an end on the cross. Rather, now he makes his temple in our bones. He isn’t just saying that his body is the location of God. He’s saying mine is and yours is, too.

Since this is true, it means our bodies reveal truths of God. I think this is fascinating to think about in light of all those things we despise about our bodies; all those things we wish were different; all those faults in our bodies…

What do those things say about God? Where is the goodness of God in the brokenness of the body?

That my body could live in the very midst of death – I don’t know – that is something… That is something that my words will fail to give voice to. This I know. But my body knows how it feels to experience grace upon grace. My intellect may not comprehend how it is true, but what my body knows is not only does Jesus reside within the body, but he has claimed our hearts for the holiest of holies.

This is the embodied truth of the Gospel – that Jesus gave his very life for.

It is in your very own body that Jesus’ heart beats.

When the body and soul feel all but dead, we intrinsically trust that His stubborn and persistent pulse will not give up on us.
And will beat for us.

If the temple was and is a place of meeting between God and God’s people and if the temple is now YOU, then… whatever your brokenness may be is a place where others might meet God through you.

I will never say I am glad that other people have had miscarriages.
But I am ever so thankful that I didn’t have to be in that space alone. A few gracious women met me in that desolate place, soothed my fears and carried my anxieties with me.

It was not their words or actions, but their actual bodies which understood and communicated the love and presence of God. They were living sanctuaries of healing in my world.

It is not only in our wholeness that Christ calls us to be places of meeting, but also in our brokenness.

When God uses that which was destroyed or defeated to bring about hope and new life TODAY, it is a way that we testify that the truth of the cross has dominion in this day and age.

So, if you are someone who met God during a mastectomy or prostate cancer,
or someone who found God didn’t abandon them after an abortion or struggled with drug or alcohol addiction,
or if you are someone who God cradled during abuse or neglect,
or if you are someone who learned to love their body after years of trying to change it,
then you are a temple for someone who is seeking refuge.

These are our temple stories. We house God for one another.

And if you are someone who is looking for that holy meeting place… I promise you there is refuge and peace and acceptance in the body of Jesus.

We are all:
Holy in pain and in shame. Holy in joy and in confidence. And everything in between. For He is glad to make His temple in you today. Amen.

[This post is from a sermon preached on the second weekend of Lent 2 based on Mark 8: 31-38 at Prince of Peace Lutheran Church.Typically we video sermons but with our technology being down this past week, we are using the good old written format.]

On the back of my van I have a bumper sticker which declares, ‘I run like a girl. Try to keep up’. It’s my little tongue-in-cheek way of displaying my own version of ‘girl power’. I know darn well that most men my age can’t keep up with me, which I am proud of. I was one of those people whose heart soared watching the ‘Run like a Girl’ commercial which aired during the 2015 Super Bowl, which sought to reinterpret the insult that ‘like a girl’ has become.

That girl power stuff – I eat it up.

Like many people, I detest the images magazines constantly project of smooth-skinned, flawless-faced, perfectly toned women with long flowing blond hair. I know they don’t exist; at least not in reality. That doesn’t mean I didn’t (or don’t) still try to obtain that level of perfection, which was always allusive to me.

And while I truly believe beautiful people are those with compassionate hearts and intriguing minds, it doesn’t mean I don’t put my make-up on in the morning and spend more money than necessary on skin creams and lipgloss. I, with millions of other women, watched and shared the Colbie Calliat music video which reminded girls and women that we don’t have to try so hard to gain worth; we already are valuable.

If I had daughters, I’d want them to see those types of commercials; those types of videos, because I’d want them to grown up into women who are comfortable in their own skin. I’d want them to know their voice is important. I’d want them to know that they are ‘enough’ exactly as they are.

But I don’t have daughters.
I have sons. Three of them.
And I want to know where all the videos are that tell my sons (and all the boys and men out there) that it’s okay to cry; that being the star football player isn’t all there is in life; that real men don’t have to drive pick-up trucks (but they can); that they are valuable just as they are.

If girls are growing up with this idea that they must be sexier, smarter, and prettier because of what they’ve seen, heard, and read, then it stands to reason that our boys have seen, heard, and read these same things.

How do my sons know that most men carry six packs in their hand on the way to the summer barbecue and not tote them on their abs, if they’ve been told that real men do? And how do my sons know that pouty lips, firm breasts, and bedroom eyes aren’t a reality if they’ve been inundated just as much as our girls?

The question we should be asking is what affect those glossed images of women and men are having on our girls and boys.

I know it’s scary to raise girls, but it is just as scary to raise boys.
We’ve set our boys up in a fantasy land, just as much as we’ve peddled it to our girls.

So to my sons who are growing up faster than I thought possible [actually to anyone – boy, man, girl, woman]:
The sexiest thing you will ever do is hold someone’s hand and cry with them – no cowboy boots necessary.
The strongest thing you will ever do is stand up for someone other than yourself – no bulging triceps needed.
The most beautiful thing you will ever see is yourself in the mirror looking back at you – no pornography or pin-up required.
The most courageous thing you will ever do is embrace the life you’ve been given – no video game will ever come close to that.

I don’t care if you ‘run like a girl’ or ‘fight like a man’; my only dream is that you grow into the men you want to be.

As I walked into the movies the other evening with my three boys, my eldest son commented about a movie which is being released about a woman who is stuck being 25 forever. I don’t know anything about the movie really, but according to my son, the woman is tortured by the fact that she CAN’T age. My son, who is 17 and more a man than a boy most days, can’t fathom the problem with this.

“25 is the perfect age. You have a job and can do what you want, but your not too old…” with a bit of a sideways glance at me. As much as I wanted to say, “I’m not old,” I didn’t, plus I don’t really think he thinks I’m a complete dinosaur. What I did say way, “I used to think 27 was the perfect age.”

I did. I thought at 27 I would’ve arrived.
And when I was 27 my life was good: a stay-home-mom with two kids, living in an idyllic neighborhood with swingsets, playdates, and friends right next door.
By the time I was 30, I’d had another baby and while life was hectic and full with three small boys running around, there was nothing my life lacked.

At least not that I knew.

Just last night I sat with two of those friends that lived right next door to me when I was 27. We no longer chat over the backyard fence while the kids dash to and fro. The kids are older and I have moved away. Life has soldiered on.

We talked about that neighborhood and those times and how much has happened since then.
Over dinner we didn’t talk about 3rd grade teachers and summer vacations anymore. Sure, we reminisced, but mostly we talked about the boatload of shit each of us has dug through (and are still digging though). We talked about the divorces, the deaths, the diseases, the failures, letting our children go, and the lack of control we have…

We confessed ways we each f*cked up our lives. And how others have inflicted pain on us.
Really uplifting topics, I know.

Life was easier at 27, but it lacked one thing: pain.
You’d think I’d long for that innocent time of ease. But I don’t.

These women sat before me with their sharp shards of pain and scars and yet, as I listened to them and as tears welled up in the corners of my eyes (and theirs), I couldn’t help but feel like we were gazing on some hidden beauty of life.

One that at 27 I didn’t know existed.

I don’t know if I have words to say what exactly that ‘hidden beauty’ is per se (this is a great frustration of being a writer – when words utterly fail to give rise to emotion), but I do know to have another woman gently hold fragments of my life that I can hardly look at with tenderness and compassion and see me as ‘good’ despite my brokenness is a glimmer of the grace in this otherwise highly glossed world. I do know that to have someone pay attention enough to know that life is not as idyllic as it looks from the swingset is one of the most honoring things you can do for another.

So, to my sons, while I do not wish upon you any of the pain that I have known in my life, nor any of the longings that my friends have known, nor any of the realizations that beyond 30 holds… I do know that you will not stay 12, 15, 17… or 25 forever. And I for that I am thankful. Because I know that you will grow to know more beauty and grace than you can see now.

You may not believe me. But give yourself 15 years or so and let’s chat.